


Elegies

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 14:59:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Frank and Alice are tortured into insanity, their family and friends think back on them as they once were--and Neville, although he cannot remember, wishes he could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elegies

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own Harry Potter or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

_Augusta_

I remember, most of all, thinking that it was just supposed to be for the afternoon. That was what I said to Scrimgeour. “They were just supposed to be gone for the afternoon,” I said. “While I watched the baby. They were supposed to be back around five.” And he looked at me and said he was sorry. I’ll bet he was.

You might say that’s not fair. Oh, I’m not saying that Scrimgeour didn’t care. He cared some, I’m sure, but he didn’t and couldn’t care like I did. He thought that pointing out that they were supposed to be back at five was odd, that I was losing my sense of proportion with grief. I’ve never lost my sense of proportion a day in my life. I meant something by saying that.

It’s difficult to be a mother: that’s what it comes down to. Some ninnies think that you just have to love your children and all the rest will come naturally, which is a lot of nonsense. You have a responsibility to your children. You need to make sure that they grow up well and that they become good people. You can’t simply do whatever will make them happy at the moment; you have to consider the future. Of course I always loved Frank, but I never spoiled him. I taught him how to behave and how to treat people, and he grew up so well—grew up into a good man. I was so proud of him. I wasn’t responsible for all of it, I suppose—I hadn’t given him his skill with a wand, I hadn’t made him intelligent—but I liked to think that I’d taught him to be brave and kind, and I felt I’d done my job well. It hadn’t always been easy, no, but not everything is supposed to be easy, and I have no patience with people who think that everything should be.

I found being a mother easier once Frank was grown and could look after himself. I remember my friends asking me if I worried about him being an auror. I did, at times, but I tried not to do so. He was doing important work and doing it well; his superiors had nothing but good things to say about him. I knew that he wouldn’t want me to be concerned, and even though it was dangerous work, I didn’t see that I had any particular reason to be. Frank wasn’t the sort to take foolish risks, and with the war heating up as it was, everyone was in danger no matter what they did. Frank’s skill would protect him, I thought, as much as anything could.

I was probably most pleased, though, when Frank had a son of his own. I had very much looked forward to that. I didn’t see the same level of responsibility in being a grandmother as in being a mother. It had been my job to teach Frank, but it would be Frank’s and Alice’s job to teach Neville. All that I had to do was love him. On the occasions when I looked after him, I could even spoil him a bit.

I was looking after Neville that afternoon. Frank and Alice brought him over around noon, and I made lunch while he toddled around and pulled at my skirt. After lunch, I helped him build a tower with blocks, and we had the sort of conversation that one has with a baby—largely one-sided talking and a few words in response. I remember telling him how clever he was.

Neville was asleep at five when Frank and Alice were supposed to come back; I thought about suggesting that they all stay for supper so that we wouldn’t have to wake him for the trip home. But they were late. At first, I didn’t think much of it. After about half an hour, I began thinking that it wasn’t like Frank. After almost an hour, I looked into their living room via the Floo network. No one was there. I looked into the Auror office, thinking that there might have been some emergency. No one knew where they were, but some young man thanked me and said that he’d look into things and let me know. All I did then was sit by Neville’s cot, wondering what could have happened. I imagined that they’d gone somewhere and lost track of time. Maybe they had run into some small problem. I worried, but I didn’t jump to any horrible conclusions—the war was over, after all, and I’ve never seen the point in imagining awful things that might not even be true.

Eventually Neville woke up and started crying; I gave him a bottle and sat on the sofa holding him. I looked at the clock. Seven-thirty. There was a knock at the door. Carrying Neville with me, I went to answer it.

I knew Rufus Scrimgeour vaguely, as Frank’s boss. He looked like he’d had a shock. “Has something happened?” I asked.

“Oh, God, the baby,” he said, staring at Neville. “Mrs. Longbottom, I have some bad news…perhaps you should sit down.”

“I’d prefer to stand,” I said, pressing Neville more tightly against my hip, ignoring his protesting squirms. “Tell me.”

“Well, no one’s died,” he said heavily. And he told me what had happened. And I wondered how it could have happened when Frank and Alice had been so very good at what they did. This wasn’t motherly pride talking. Everyone had said that they were some of the best aurors out there. Now that the war was over, how could it have happened like that? They must have fought, I told myself, must have fought hard until the end. It was four against two. Cowardly, cowardly, evil scum. I asked Scrimgeour when Frank and Alice would be well again. He said that no one knew when—when or if.

“If?” I asked. “Is it likely, then, that they won’t recover?” Scrimgeour looked desperately uncomfortable and said that, yes, the Healers thought that it was likely that they wouldn’t. I think he had expected me to start crying by this point, but I didn’t. I just held Neville closer and thought about all that I’d have to do. Get his things from Frank’s and Alice’s. Set up a nursery. Get him ready for Hogwarts. Look after him until he was grown. Help him grow up into a good man. Make sure that he understood who his parents had been. Make sure that he became someone who would have made them proud.

That was why I said, “They were just supposed to be gone for the afternoon. While I watched the baby. They were supposed to be back around five.” Because this made everything different. I would have to be like a mother to Neville. I had new responsibilities. I couldn’t spoil him any longer.

I love Neville very much. He’s a good boy, a sweet and kind boy. He tries very hard to do the right thing. But I feel as though I haven’t done enough. I know it isn’t Neville’s fault that he doesn’t have Frank’s natural abilities with a wand—it’s not something that anyone can do anything about—but I just want him to grow up like Frank. I would want Frank to be proud if he knew who Neville was. I don’t want to fail my son.

 

_Alastor_

There are certain rules that I’ve set up for myself, things that I think are important to remember in my line of work. Constant vigilance. Watch out for poison. Stay on task when you’re tracking someone. And don’t get overly attached to your colleagues.

For the most part, I’ve followed these rules. There’s not much point in setting up rules that you don’t follow. I have to admit that I’ve gotten attached to a few people in my time, though. Not that I go around shouting about it.

The Longbottoms were two that I got attached to. I remember when they both joined the department, two young people just out of school. I noticed from the first that they were talented. Neither of them made a lot of stupid mistakes. And you could tell that they really cared about their work, which can be even more important than raw talent. There’s nothing worse than some trainee who thinks that he can be as careless as he likes just because he’s got a bit of skill with a wand. Then they started flirting a few months into their training, and I was worried that it would make them waste all their potential. Flirting, in my experience, tends to do that. In this case, though, it didn’t. The two of them continued to be top of the class. Still had room for improvement, of course, but they were coming along well.

So the first thing that impressed me was their talent and dedication, and they turned out to be a decent pair of people too, once you got to know them. Alice was the easier of the two to get to know. She was chattier, always one to say hello whenever she saw you and to ask after you. Not my style, but impossible to find offensive. She was sweet as anything, but she also had a lot of grit. If there was something new and difficult to try, Alice was always among the first to volunteer. She’d do the things that no one else had the gumption to do.

Frank was quieter. The thing that stood out about him most was how dogged he was. He took the training very seriously, would work and work at something until he had it perfect. You’d see him making sure that other people who were having a hard time in training were doing all right—not really saying anything, but going over and sitting with them or working next to them until they pulled their socks up and did better. Seemed like a waste of time to me when you could just shout at those people, but I couldn’t deny that it seemed to work, on occasion. And even though he was quiet, he wasn’t afraid to express his thoughts. He and Alice were both outspoken against the Death Eaters from the beginning in a way that not a lot of people were in those days—you may take it for granted now that the Death Eaters were a despicable lot, but back then you got your fair share of people who thought that they weren’t that bad, even in the Auror Office.

And they…well…there was something nice about the two of them together. I’m not saying that I much cared about their personal life, but you might even say that they were sweet together. You’d see them together on their lunch break; she’d be cutting up and he’d be laughing like anything, which was a part of him that you didn’t often see. You could tell, too, that he respected her skills on the job. I’ve never had any patience for men who don’t, when it comes to women. We need everyone we can get in this department.

They invited me to their wedding, which was about a year after they finished training. I went to the ceremony and then left. There was work to be done, which they understood. We found out about a Death Eater attack in London about an hour later, so I looked into the reception to ask them to come lend a hand. Scrimgeour said that I shouldn’t disturb them during an important occasion—he’s a decent department head, but he’s never quite grasped the “constant” part of “constant vigilance”—but they were up and ready as soon as I told them what was happening. That impressed me.

I was impressed enough, in fact, to issue the two of them an invitation of my own. The Order needed everyone we could get, and I thought that Frank and Alice would be a strong addition. They hated the Death Eaters as much as anyone I knew, they were talented and prepared for the fight, and they weren’t foolhardy. I was pleased when they accepted my offer almost immediately.

In the six years that we were in the Order, they never did anything to make me sorry that I’d asked them. They were some of the bravest people we had. They were always ready and dependable, even after they’d had the baby. They were—I suppose I want to say that they were good people. And that they were very human people. Even when things got the darkest, Alice was still there asking after you, and Frank was still making sure that everyone was doing all right, just like they’d done during the beginning of Auror training. Sometimes she’d crack a joke that would make everyone laugh, or he’d put his arms around her during a meeting and they’d sit there like that for a while. It was things like that, I suppose, that made me get attached to them in spite of my rule.

Sometimes I’m sorry that I got attached. If I hadn’t, I probably would have said that it was a damn shame what happened to them, but I wouldn’t have been as sorry as I was—as I still am, I suppose. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard to bring anyone in as I did those four monsters who tortured them. I barely slept, and I shouted at so many people that even the ones who knew me well were afraid. I was glad when I’d finally caught them, but I couldn’t help knowing that it didn’t really help Frank and Alice. There wasn’t anything that I could do to help them. I hated that.

They were a pair of good people, when you get down to it. I’m glad I knew them, even if I did get attached. There are a lot of times at the Auror Office when I wish they were still around.

 

_Cora_

I think we were meant to be best friends. We were sorted one right after the other—Cora Burns and Alice Cameron—and both into Hufflepuff. She smiled at me as soon as she sat down and said, “Hi. My name’s Alice. What’s yours?”

“Cora,” I said. We talked for a while during the feast about this and that—our families, what we liked to do, how excited we were to be at Hogwarts. It’s funny to think of it now, to remember that there was a time when we knew almost nothing about each other.

We were friendly from the start, but we didn’t become real friends until the middle of October, when Alice found me crying in the library. Puberty had come for me early and I had pretty big breasts for an eleven year old, and there were some Gryffindor boys who’d been taunting me for weeks. After a particularly bad morning, I’d gone to hide myself between some shelves, put my face in my hands, and started sobbing like anything.

Somehow Alice turned up there, even though I’d specifically chosen an area with books on very obscure spells. “Cora?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I remember being a little embarrassed to say, but she put her arms around me and patted my back and said that she was sure that we could do something about whatever it was, so eventually I blurted out, “They said that I was a fat tart!”

“But you’re not!” Alice said. “Who said that? Why?” So I told her what had been going on, and she just listened to me, hugging me the whole time and not seeming to mind that I was crying all over her.

When I was finished talking, Alice said, without missing a beat, “Next time they say something like that to you, you tell them that they’re a bunch of stupid gits.”

“I couldn’t,” I said, wiping my eyes. “They wouldn’t listen to me. It would just make everything worse.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Alice said. “You just have to show them that you’re not scared of them, Cora.”

“But…but I am,” I said.

Alice was quiet for a minute, and then she squeezed my shoulders. “That’s all right,” she said. “You just have to act like you’re not. Don’t let them see if you’re scared. That’s how you act brave. And then they can’t hurt you.”

I still wasn’t sure, but Alice seemed to really believe what she said. So eventually I said, “All right,” and we left the library together.

The next time I had a run-in with those boys was in the corridor between classes two days later. Alice happened to be next to me, and when they started in, she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Go on.”

I was still so scared, but I did everything I could not to show it. I pulled myself up to my full eleven-year-old height and said, “You’re a bunch of stupid gits.” There was a silence, which felt long and dreadful and made me wonder what horrible thing they were thinking up to say next. Then, incredibly, they sort of snickered half-heartedly and moved past us. I was safe.

As we hurried on to Charms, I turned to Alice and said, “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Of course,” Alice said. “We have to stick together, don’t we? You were so brave there. I told you it would work. I told you that you could do it.” We smiled at each other and took our seats.

If we’d had no other interaction, I think that I would still think of Alice fondly. But after that we became best friends.

We were always together at Hogwarts, so much so that people talked about us as “CoraandAlice.” I could tell Alice anything—if I had a problem, I knew that she’d always listen—and she did the same with me. And we had so many jokes, complex things that no one else had any hope of understanding. Alice was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and she wasn’t one of those people who try to be funny. She just had the talent for it, and I can’t even count all the nights we sat around in the Hufflepuff common room or in our dormitory, laughing until we couldn’t speak.

Of course we stayed close after school. We’d meet up regularly for lunch, talking about work and love and whatever else came up. I met Phil at a party at my sister’s—he was a friend of her boyfriend’s—and we started going out soon after, so I told Alice all about him. She told me about Frank, about how they’d been flirting a little during training but nothing really seemed to be coming of it. Then, at one of our lunches, she told me, “I may have drunkenly propositioned Frank Longbottom last night.”

“Alice!” I said. “Details.”

“We went out for drinks with a lot of the other trainees,” Alice said, “at the Leaky Cauldron. And we were laughing and flirting, and eventually when I had enough drinks in me I suggested that he take me home to bed.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Well, he did take me home,” Alice said, “and he sat me down on the bed, and then when he saw that I was all right and that I wasn’t going to be sick, he told me goodnight and left. He’s a good bloke, Cora. There are a lot of people who probably wouldn’t have done that.” She smiled impishly. “I think I’ll proposition him sober next time I see him.”

I started laughing. “You should,” I said. “Absolutely.”

“Oh, I will,” said Alice. “I’ll start small, I think—dinner, light snogging—and work my way back up to inviting him to take my pants off.” I laughed even harder then, and Alice joined me. But I knew that she was serious about Frank.

Phil and I went on a double date with Alice and Frank a couple of weeks later. I never got to know Frank especially well, but I liked him. He appreciated Alice and made her happy. That was enough for me. When she told me that they were going to get married, I was beyond excited for her.

Alice and I hit the typical milestones together—we were each other’s bridesmaids, we had our kids two years apart—but what meant the most to me was the way we’d meet up and talk, still, just the way that we had when we were first years. Sometimes we’d just talk about nothing. Sometimes we’d talk about things that were much more important—about the war, for instance. I knew that Alice was doing dangerous and important work, things that she couldn’t even tell me about, and I admired her for it. I couldn’t have done it myself. But Alice was always brave.

We never really said goodbye, at least not in any special way. The last time we talked was a November afternoon—it stayed warm late that year—when we took our kids to the park together. She was pushing Neville in his pushchair, and I was holding Cathy’s hand. We were talking, I think, about what we were going to do for Christmas that year. It was going to be the first Christmas since the war had ended. “It’s still such a busy time at work,” I remember Alice saying. “We’ll probably end up throwing something together at the last minute. But it’ll be fun.” We parted at the end of the afternoon with a quick hug and tentative plans to do the same thing the following weekend.

A few days later, I was sitting with Phil after supper when someone knocked at the door. I got up and opened it to find Maggie Macmillan, who’d been in my year in Hufflepuff and who worked at Saint Mungo’s. I remember starting to say something about it being a nice surprise when she cut me off by saying, “Cora…did you hear what happened?”

“What happened?” I repeated.

Maggie looked stricken. “I shouldn’t be telling you,” she said. “It’ll probably mean my job if anyone finds out, but it’ll be all over the papers in a day or two anyway…and I know how close the two of you still were and I didn’t want you to find out that way. It’s Alice, Cora. Alice and Frank. Some Death Eaters…they…they tortured them…for hours…” She broke off then, her voice choking up, and I remember thinking, dimly, that I hadn’t know that it was possible to feel this horrible and that there was no way that I could feel any worse.

“Oh my God,” I said. “No…I…oh God, when…I…no…is there…is there anything that I can do?” I must have sounded ridiculous. “For the funeral…or anything?”

“Not the funeral,” Maggie said. “They’re not dead, Cora…they just…they lost their minds…they don’t know anyone or what’s going on…and…and…well…some of the healers are saying it’s too soon to know for sure but really we do know…they’re not going to get better…”

I had been wrong about not being able to feel any worse. “Oh,” I said. “Oh God, I…thank you for coming to tell me Maggie it was really thoughtful but would you mind going now?”

Maggie nodded. “Of course,” she said. “Let me know if you need to talk.” Then she left, and I went inside and cried and cried.

Mostly I thought about when Alice and I had first become friends, what she’d said to me. “Don’t let them see if you’re scared. That’s how you act brave. And then they can’t hurt you.” Alice must have been scared when they came, I thought. Anyone would have been. But I knew that she would have taken her own advice, that she wouldn’t have let them see her fear, that she would have been brave, that she would have fought them. And then they’d hurt her anyway. It wasn’t right—it wasn’t right that it had worked for me back then, when I’d had such a small problem, and that it hadn’t worked for Alice now, Alice who was the bravest person I knew.

It’s been seven years now, and I still think about Alice a lot. I’ve seen Neville a few times, although not as much as I’d like—Frank’s mother is bringing him up, and she didn’t seem that receptive to my attempts to reach out. I suppose I understand that. It must be even more difficult for her. I just like to see that he’s doing all right on occasion, though, and to tell him a little bit about Alice. He was too young to remember her, and he ought to know who she was.

I’ve gone to see Alice herself as well. It might seem pointless—she has no idea who I am, as far as I can tell—but I’ll just sit next to her bed for a while and talk. She was the best friend I ever had, and she was always there for me. So I like to be there for her.

 

_Fay_

I was sorry to hear about Ed’s death. It’s been about eight years since we split up, but he was never a bad man. He made me happy enough for thirty years, and what happened wasn’t really his fault. I wish he’d warned me from the first, that he’d sat down with me in that bar on the night that we met and told me that he was a wizard and that if I married him and had a daughter with him something horrible might happen and that I ought to get out while I still could, but it’s too late to wish for impossible things. It wasn’t his fault that he was what he was, but the fact remains that it wouldn’t have happened—my daughter wouldn’t have lost her mind—if it hadn’t been for his whole stupid world. So I couldn’t stay with him after that.

Ed told me that he was a wizard when we’d been seeing each other for nearly a year. I think I asked him if he was drunk. Even once I realized that he wasn’t having me on, I don’t think that I really understood what it all meant. I think I saw it as some sort of quirk—more intense than stamp collecting, not as bad as having sex with farm animals. I wasn’t exactly wild about it even then, but I didn’t imagine that it was going to be a horrible problem. And, well, I cared about him already, cared about him enough that I decided that it didn’t matter if he wanted to go through life waving a wand. At least it explained why he was so stupid about so many day-to-day things.

So we stayed together and eventually got married, and we had Alice a few years later. She was our only child. Honestly, there was a part of me that didn’t want to go through the weirdness again—teddy bears flying about the room and all that. It sometimes made me feel odd that Alice and Ed had this whole life that I didn’t really understand. He said that she had a lot of early magical aptitude. I didn’t know about that. All I knew was that she was an intelligent child and that she was kind and that she played nicely with the other children in the neighborhood. That was more important to me. Even though she was like Ed in these ways that were beyond me, even though she eventually went off to that strange school, I saw a lot of myself in her personality.

Then that stupid war that I never understood happened. Alice and Ed said that I ought to at least try to understand it. “It really is affecting everyone, Mum,” I remember Alice telling me. “I know you can’t see everything that’s happening, but the Death Eaters would kill any of us as soon as look at us. That’s why I’ve got to fight.”

The sort of fighting that Alice and her husband did worried me. I’d never really gotten used to the idea that a little piece of wood could be an effective weapon. I told her once that I would have felt more comfortable if she had a gun, and she laughed and said that that wasn’t how the Auror Office operated but that she was really good with a spell and that I shouldn’t worry. I told her that I couldn’t help worrying. “I know,” she said. “I worry too, Mum. Every day. Especially now.” She rested a hand on her stomach. “But I know that I’m doing the right thing. I’ve got to think about what kind of world I want the baby to grow up in. I can’t just sit by and watch evil things happen, even if that would keep me safe.”

As you can imagine, I didn’t find this particularly reassuring, but Ed would tell me over and over again that Alice was very good at what she did. “They don’t take anything but the best in the Auror Office,” he said. He was always sweet to me whenever I worried about wizarding things.

The worst didn’t happen for a while. Alice had close shaves but made it through. Eventually she had Neville, who was almost as sweet a baby as she had been herself. I remember hoping that she’d be a little more careful after he was born. Once you have a child to look after, you don’t want to take so many risks.

But then the worst did happen. It turned out that a little piece of wood could be an effective weapon—one that could be used against my daughter, one that could take her mind away from her. My Alice who had been so good and smart and kind.

Ed did try to be there for me. I’ll give him that. We spent the first few weeks just crying together. But every time I saw him do some kind of spell I wanted to hit him. As far as I was concerned, magic was nothing but trouble. If he hadn’t been able to do magic in the first place, Alice wouldn’t have been able to do it either, and she wouldn’t have been in that stupid war, and nothing would have happened to her. I started snapping at Ed, and I think he tried to be patient—that he thought I might change my mind about magic. But I didn’t change my mind.

I think he realized that about six months after it happened, when we got an invitation to some event commemorating the war and those who had fallen in it. “We’re not going,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with those people.”

“We should go,” Ed said. “Maybe we’d meet other people who…who are going through something similar.”

“I have no desire to meet other people who were involved in that,” I said. “Those people…they as good as killed our daughter.”

Ed put a hand on my arm. “Fay,” he said. “It was a war. Alice was a hero, and we—”

“Don’t you dare talk like that!” I shouted at him. “Don’t you dare act like there was any reason for it, like there was something good and noble behind what they did to her! Why did you all have to start this war? It’s all because of your magic…that’s what did it…and if you think that I want to spend another second with a bunch of wizards...” I shoved him aside and left the room. I was sobbing, as much from rage—rage at the whole wizarding world—as from sorrow.

Ed and I tried after that, but it didn’t work. I knew I’d really hurt him, but I couldn’t apologize, and he couldn’t do anything that would change my mind about magic. Most of our conversations turned into cold silences. I think he brought up the idea of a divorce first, but I agreed right away. We finalized the whole thing about six months later. That was it.

I’ve seen him more often than I would have thought since then. I go to visit Alice, and I need a wizard with me to get into that ridiculous hospital. And I’ve seen him on Neville’s birthdays. I understand that he and Frank’s mother had a fair amount of contact, but she’s never really seemed to care for me. The two of us don’t really talk when I go around to see Neville. I wonder if Ed told her what I said about magic. I wonder if that’s why. Not that I care if it is. She is quite the battleaxe.

Ed and I never really talked when we saw each other—just exchanged pleasantries and the like—but I am sorry to hear about what happened. He was a good husband to me for thirty years. I just couldn’t be with a wizard any longer.

 

_Neville_

I’ve always had a hopeless memory. I had a few Remembralls during my Hogwarts years, but they never did me any good; I always ended up losing them, anyway. And I’d forget things that I needed to know for examinations. I used to worry about it a lot, but after a while it stopped bothering me so much. I’ve been thinking about it more in the last two years, though, because of Charlotte.

I’m not worried that I’ll forget to feed her or leave her somewhere in her pushchair or anything like that. They say that it does happen, but I don’t think I’m that hopeless. But there are things I’d like to tell her when she gets older, things that I can’t remember.

You see, Charlotte has Grandfather Abbott. He’s around at our place practically every week, and the two of them are as thick as thieves. And even though she doesn’t have Grandmother Abbott, she has a lot of things from her. There’s a lullaby that Hannah sings her, one that her mum used to sing to her. There are some games that Hannah and her mum used to play. There’s some jewelry that Hannah’s put aside for when she grows up. There’s her first name. “When she gets older,” Hannah told me once, “I’m going to tell her all about my mum. She should know who she’s named for.” She sighed and rested her head against my shoulder. “Mum would have loved her so much, Neville.”

I’d never want to act like I think it’s easy for Hannah. It might be even harder when you can remember. I just mean that Hannah has things that she knows about her mum, things that she can pass on to Charlotte. I don’t really have anything like that from my parents. Her middle name is my mum’s name, but that’s about as far as I can go. There must have been some lullabies and games when I was a baby, but I can’t remember them. I can’t even say that my parents would have loved Charlotte. I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have, but I can’t know for sure. I don’t remember anything about what they were like.

I’ve heard some things, of course, from my grandmothers and my grandfather, from friends of my parents’, from other aurors or from people who were in the Order. It’s really good of them to tell me, but it’s not the same as knowing these things myself. It’s probably not a full picture either. I mean, Hannah once told me that her mum used to nag her about keeping her hair neat. No one’s going to tell me about my parents nagging anyone. Not that that would be the sort of thing I’d want to pass on to Charlotte anyway, but it would be nice to know for myself. I’d just like to know them. I don’t blame myself for not being able to remember—I wasn’t even two years old—but I still wish I could.

I could take her to see them, of course. I did take her along when she was a baby, but now she’s old enough to know what’s going on and that makes me hesitate. Of course I went to see them when I was her age, and I’m glad that Gran brought me, but it was always hard. I don’t know if I want to do that to Charlotte. Or when I should explain to her what happened.

I know that I’ll tell her what I know one day. I’ll tell her that her middle name is from her grandmother and that her grandmother and grandfather were brave and good people. I’ll tell her the stories that I’ve been told, but I won’t have any stories of my own, any stories that I can remember. I wish I did, for Charlotte’s sake. And for my own.


End file.
